First, I would like to congratulate the YouthMappers at AUW for wining the HOT micro-grant award with other seven communities globally. I would also appreciate other micro communities and chapters for competing the micro grant program and wish you luck for the next one. I would like to congratulate YouthMappers DhakaCollege, YouthMappers at AUW for wining 2017 chapter award, Maliha Mohiuddin from OpenStreetMap Dhaka University for wining best blog award 2017 and also other three chapter members for wining the leadership award and going to participate in workshop to be held in Nepal.

Let me give you some upcoming mapping programs that are under discussion but hoping to be launched soon:

There will be a series of mapathons for mapping the existing features of 13 coastal districts of Bangladesh what we want to organize in a different manner. We will call for application/proposal from chapters, micro-communities, universities who wants to hold the mapathon/s at their premises. The selected will have the required training, logistics, appreciation certificate. I shall call for the application within a month or two.

BDRCS Volunteers are going to be engaged soon for community level training and mapping. We are planning to expand the mapping of vulnerable buildings for urban resilience where the city ward emergency response committee members will be taught how to and map their respective wards. In near future we want to replicate for disaster vulnerable districts too.

To find and enhance more use cases of existing OSM data in Bangladesh we would like to call for participation of a research teams, person/s in a research grant program . The selected teams or persons have to come up with scoping ideas showing result of spatial analysis, vulnerability assessment, risk analysis, scenario modeling or future projections. I will invite the potential universities and also open call for other researcher or team when we are ready.

I want to map the Nijhum Dwip - নিঝুম দ্বীপ, one of the most vulnerable island in Bangladesh where loss of lives and livelihoods are common matter due to cyclone and storm surge. I would request some volunteers to assist me in field level data collection and mapping in next month.

Finally, I am very happy that more and more service delivery and routing startups are using OepnStreetMap for their application. NerdCats team is going to update their Bus rout app based on openstreetmap after their famous and successful app GO! Traffic Updates (by GObd.co). Pathao service wants to use and update the roads of whole Dhaka city, for that they are going to organize a mapathon in 29th of this month jointly with OpenStreetMap Bangladesh community. I am requesting all the members of our community to join this mapathon and help Pathao to make a better and detail dhaka map.

Thanks. I wish you all the best in coming days.
Happy new Bangla Year 1424.

The efforts of OSM Bangladesh are an inspiration for the region to show how citizens can organize themselves to build critical products like map data faster, more detailed and at a lower cost than the government and make more efficient use of the available resources.

Wishing you much success and looking forward to learning from your experiences to grow the community in India.